Happy Anniversary

Today I have officially been in Korea for one year!

I feel really good about this. It's been an amazing year and I have become so comfortable since wandering out of Incheon airport one year ago in a fit of nerves and uncertainty. I'm ready to head home to spend time with my family and friends but I will miss Korea so so much. I grew up a lot here. I learned a lot about myself and what I am capable of. 

And there have been so many awesome experiences. Korea is an amazing country with a lot to offer. Sure, there are things that I won't be sorry to say goodbye to, like squatter toilets and the smell of bundaegi. But the things about Korea that I will miss far outnumber the things that I will not.

I pretty much have hit everything on my "Things to do in Korea" list except that since the spring I've really wanted to rent a bike and ride along the Han River. So today Brianna and I finally decided to do just that. We woke up early and took the train to Yeouinaru Station, right by the 63 Building, and rented a couple of bikes. 

It was a perfect day for it. The park was almost completely empty which meant there weren't many other bikers and though the day was chilly it felt nice once we were riding for a while. I can't remember the last time I rode a bike! Which is sad! I always liked riding one during summer vacations when my family rented a cottage by the beach because the neighborhood was big and flat and there weren't many cars and it's a nice way to spend an afternoon, just cruising around. 

The bike path is something like 40 kilometers long and it's a really nice ride. We only rented ours for a couple of hours but the area we biked was mostly flat with a few hills thrown in. It follows right along the river so the view is decent and there are lots of places to rest, use the bathroom, or get a drink at a water fountain (or a snack at a convenience store) along the way. 

After that we headed to City Hall Station to find lunch. We ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant and I had a weird feeling of coming full circle because I remember that my first meal in Korea when I got here exactly a year ago was at a Vietnamese restaurant too. I usually don't eat Vietnamese food so, I don't know, it was just a strange thing I guess. The whole day just felt like saying goodbye and that added to it somehow.

Then we headed to Deoksugung Palace to check out the Seoul Museum of Art which is located on the palace grounds. We were actually just at this palace last week but it was at night and the museum wasn't open then.

We were AWWWing so loud at this adorable little boy. 

The museum wasn't really what I was expecting and was kind of a let down. I guess I thought it was going to be much bigger, my mistake, and we were done in about 30 minutes. It holds four exhibit halls and is currently running an exhibit called "Art of Communication".

Each artist had a few of their works on display and I only cared for one or two of them. Then again I don't really like contemporary art so maybe if there had been a different exhibition running it would have been more enjoyable.

After the museum Brianna headed back to Incheon and I went down the street to Kyobo Bookstore to check off one last thing on my Korean to-do list. Since the store is next to Gwanghwamun Square I stopped to take some pictures.

Admiral Yi Sun-sun, a famous commander from the Joseon Dynasty and all around badass dude. 

Sejong the Great, fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, creator of the Korean alphabet (Hangul) and the face on your ₩10,000 bank note. Also it is difficult to see in my photo (I need to get a zoom lens) but on the left, at the foot of the mountain is Cheongwadae, called the Blue House, where the President lives.

I love Gwanghwamun Square. I was actually there last weekend for the first time and couldn't believe it had taken me so long to see it. It was nighttime then and the place was buzzing with people just relaxing on the grass and talking with friends. It's just a really cool place. You don't leave Korea without knowing who Admiral Yi Sun-sin and King Sejong are. They are huge figures here. So being in this place with their statues looking out over the city and the President's House behind them and all these people around felt rather like being in Washington D.C. and looking out at the Washington Monument from the Lincoln Memorial. I think the idea is the same, you get the same vibe, it holds the same significance. 

I think really what I am most happy about as I look back on my year here is that I squeezed as much out of the experience as possible. I know some people who come to Korea and leave without having done much more than sit at the local bar week after week. And hey the local bars can be great, it's part of the experience. But there is so much to this country that every week I have done or eaten or seen or tried something new. I went up mountains, into caves, swam in the Yellow Sea, wandered countless museums, walked through a tunnel toward North Korea, explored temples and palaces, and so much more.

Everyone comes to Korea for different reasons and I know it's not my place to judge what you do with your time. But I will say that if you don't get out and explore you are missing out big time. There are endless adventures to be had no matter what sort of things you are interested in. Don't leave without partaking in some of them!

(It's okay if you skip the squat toilets though)

Trivia of the Day: Jeju Loveland (제주러브랜드) (also known as Love Land) is an outdoor sculpture park on Jeju Island in South Korea. Twenty artists, mainly graduates of top art school Hongik University, helped open it in November 2004. The park is focused on a theme of sex, running sex education films, and featuring 140 sculptures representing humans in various sexual positions. It also has other elements such as large phallus statues, stone labia, and hands-on exhibits such as a "masturbation-cycle." Jeju Love Land is a place where art and eroticism meet in cool, fun, humorous styles.

*Jeju was recently named as one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World and since then I've seen a few supposed "facts" saying something like, "There is an island in Korea that is full of sex statues and it was just named a wonder of the world". Ehhh, not quite. Love Land is only a park on the island and it's a pretty reasonable location for it considering that Jeju is a honeymoon spot for Korean newlyweds. 

And now, back to your regularly scheduled program

So I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. Yet.

This week is Level-Up test week and though that part is actually pretty easy on teachers, our student reports were due today and those are a pain in the tuckus. Basically they're just like report cards. The form is all set up in a word document and then we go through for each class adding our name, the class level and time, and the student's Korean name and English nickname. So lots of copy/pasting. Fun times. Then we highlight boxes to indicate how well they're performing in certain areas of class- Weak, Average or Strong- as well as boxes that indicate their levels of participation, attention, and behavior. At the bottom we add comments for each student. I had roughly sixty-five reports to fill out which actually isn't awful but it took me forever. I think I wrote way more comments than necessary but I'd rather overdo it my first time around just in case.

But now that those are over I can breathe easy. So far this week I've only taught one class since my Level 1 (EC and Memory classes) kids have been taking the Level-Up practice test. Then I'll be giving the actual test out tomorrow and Friday to four classes. We grade the students' writing and speaking portions but the listening and reading sections are graded via scantron so that's pretty sweet. And this is our nine day week since we're working Saturday and Sunday to make up for Lunar New Year so I'm more than happy to be taking it easy over the next few days.

This past Saturday I went to Lotte World with Heather and Jim, the two co-workers that I'll be heading to Taiwan with. Lotte is the big name in Korea. There's Lotte Department Store, Lotteria (essentially the Korean McDonald's), Lotte Confectionery, Lotte Mart (where I buy my groceries), Lotte Hotel, Lotte Capital Co, Ltd., and even a baseball team in Busan called the Lotte Giants.

So of course it would only follow that Lotte would have its own amusement park.

Lotte World is the world's largest indoor theme park and close to about two hours from Incheon by subway. So we took an express bus to Gangnam (note to self: it was the 6405) that took about fifty minutes and then jumped on the subway to Jamsil Station. There's a shopping area and ticket booth for Lotte World right within the station so you can't miss it. There was a line though so we bought tickets at an outdoor booth which wasn't busy at all because of the cold. Tickets were ₩26,000 which seemed reasonable.

To the left and right are Lotty and Lorry, Lotte's equivalent of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. I think they're raccoons.

We actually didn't get on too many rides since the lines were pretty long. We were supposed to meet up with Traci and a few other folks and when I talked to her later she said this one wasn't all that exciting anyway. 

The food court was packed. We hovered for a while and when one older Korean woman noticed me looking pitiful I played it up and when her family left she very nicely offered us her table. That didn't stop a family of four from scooching in next to us but oh well, we just needed somewhere to sit.

What is it with amusement parks relying on giant creepy faces to attract children? That clock is one tick away from driving a white van through suburban neighborhoods to hand out candy. 

This poor guy. Look at that uniform. What a cruel, badly mismatched world we live in sometimes.

After getting some food and looking around we headed outside to enjoy some of the attractions there while it was still sunny. 

The outdoor area is called Magic Island and this is the Magic Castle. And I'm sure they know that they aren't fooling anyone about where they got their inspiration from. 

Inside this candy house we went on a ride called Fantasy Dreams. You hopped aboard a choo-choo which then drove you through a giant clown mouth into a Care Bear nightmare of lollipops and instrument-playing bugs and ginormous jacks-in-the-box popping out in one area and a rat wizard and some kind of abnormally enlarged singing vegetables and a gluttonous dragon chilling at the end. It was the trippiest thing ever and basically what I imagine the inside of Wayne Coyne's head to look like. 

Nothing like an authentic Korean churro.

We wanted to ride the bumper cars which was a good idea except that it was a much longer wait than the thirty minutes promised. The problem was that there was only one worker operating the cars and every time people hopped out she had to go onto the track to clear up the jams so it took forever.

There were really fun though. All the groups of people in front of us were driving their cars cautiously and actually trying to avoid each other. We weren't having any of that though and luckily we got to drive around with a bunch of teenage boys who enjoyed smashing the cars as much as we did.

I swear this park had every headband/animal ear combination you could want. Red bows, red sparkly bows, red sparkly ears, leopard print ears, leopard print bows, black sparkly bows, black furry ears, white furry ears, snow leopard ears, and on and on forever. A good majority of the teenagers were wearing some variation, boys and girls alike.

We escaped back inside for a while and ended up going through the

Dun dun dunnn! Basically it was a lame haunted house. And by lame I mean I did scream once but something popped out at me. I'm not built for even slightly spooky okay? I'm the girl that had an improvised rope/broken hair elastic system rigged to the string that turned off my closet light so that I could shut it off while safe in bed and thus avoid having to walk across the floor in the dark. Yeah.

After wandering some more we decided to head downstairs to the ice rink for some skating. Technically the rink isn't part of Lotte World so you have to exit through a turnstile but we did have our hands stamped and kept our tickets handy just in case we wanted to go back in after.

Skate rental and the fee for about 30 minutes on the ice was something like ₩13,000 total. Not a great deal but I haven't skated since I was a kid and it looked fun. The rink is stupidly designed in that you put your skates on in one area and then have to walk down a flight of stairs and back up another flight of stairs to get to the ice. It was awkward as hell and everyone was death gripping the railings. 

They were cleaning the ice when we made it to the waiting area around the rink and it literally took them thirty minutes to finish it. I've never seen it take that long, it was crazy. And after thirty minutes my feet were already killing from having all my weight on the blades and I hadn't even done anything yet. 

When I finally did get out there it was slow going. I was always okay at roller skating when I was younger but ice skating is another thing. I did make it around a few times though and despite a few near misses managed to not wipe out, woo! Heather had never ice skated before but successfully did a full lap and Jim spent the time taking surprise pictures of us wearing our bright yellow helmets (with chin straps) as we struggled to remain vertical. May those pictures remain in the confines of a memory card. 

I grabbed a quick chicken sandwich from Lotteria since I hadn't eaten lunch and then we headed up and outside to a T.G.I. Friday's close by for drinks. Since we weren't sure which bus to take back we just took the subway and the ride wasn't bad. Back in Yeonsu we all did some grocery shopping then called it a night.

Sunday was my do nothing day and it was wonderful. I spent half the day sleeping and the other half snuggled in my squashy old man chair watching Storm of the Century. It was a snowy day after all and I'm missing out on all the crazy New England weather right now so it was an appropriate choice on several levels. 

Wednesdays are usually the nights I go out after work for food and drinks with everyone since a lot of us have the second class off but I enjoyed myself too much last Wednesday and really just wanted a quiet night tonight. And I'm saving my pennies anyway since this time next week I'll be in Taiwan! It's going to be something like thirty or forty degrees warmer than Incheon and I cannot wait for that weather. It's also going to be down-pouring like crazy since this time of year is especially rainy in Taipei but I'll take living under an umbrella for four days in exchange for any sort of increase in temperature. 

Sister Springtime I am most looking forward to your arrival. 

Movie Trivia of the Day: Empress Chung is a 2005 North and South Korean animated film directed by Nelson Shin. Most of the animation work was done in North Korea by the Chosun April 26th Children Film Studio, and the score was also recorded in the North by the Pyongyang Film and Broadcasting Orchestra. In a move unusual for the Korean film industry, the character voices were recorded in both the South and the North due to differences in dialect. For the definitive international release version, the South Korean dub is the one used. It was the first film to have been released simultaneously in both North and South Korea, on August 12, 2005. The film was featured at the 2004 Annecy International Animation Festival, and was also recognised with several awards in Korea. The story is an epic adventure based on a famous Korean folk tale about a daughter who sacrifices herself to restore her blind father's eyesight.